Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried And Death By Landscape'

In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien constructs a seemingly autobiographical yet ostensibly fictional story of the war in Vietnam and its effects on a platoon of American soldiers. O’Brien’s inclusion of fact within fiction strengthens the rhetoric of the individual stories in The Things They Carried while leaving readers to question the overall truthfulness and validity of the stories. The members of the American platoon also question plausibility when struggling to grasp the credibility of Rat Kiley’s story of his first assignment near the Song Tra Bong river. Kiley describes his time in the Chu Liu mountains when a young medic named Mark Fossie decides to bring a girl named Mary Anne to the camp to demonstrate the camp’s lack of safety.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, follows a father and son on their journey through a post apocalyptic world. Throughout this journey, the man and his child are faced with many challenges and obstacles that they must overcome in order to survive. These obstacles consist of cannibals, food scarcity, and even harsh outdoor environments. One theme that is heavily presented throughout the duration of this novel is that death is inevitable. McCarthy often uses imagery to show death, whether that be through the horrific and detailed descriptions of the corpses or through the destroyed and ash-filled climates.

In the text “The Dogs Could Teach Me”, the author describes every detail of what the character is surrounded by. Paulsen describes the waterfall as “... the falling lobes of blue ice that had grown as the water froze and refroze, layering on itself…”. In this example, the author is describing how they see where the waterfall had kept layering and layering on top of itself after the refreezing of water. In the text “The Flowers”, the author does a fairly decent job explaining what was happening in the story but hardly explaining the setting and what the character is surrounded by. The text talks about the woods behind Myop’s family sharecropper house and how she explores it a lot of the time, but the author never explains what it looks within the woods.

It’s possible that she saw the landscape as something as wild as the Native Americans that kidnapped her and her family. Christopher Columbus’ Journal of the First Voyage to America, 1492-1493 and Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration were two very different ways to view the landscape of the new world. While Columbus saw the beauty in the new world, Rowlandson only saw the sadder and uglier side of the new world. From enchanting and beautiful, to desolate wilderness, these authors bring into question how your situation can color your perception of something as simple as the

Protagonist Miranda is a normal 16 year old who lives in Pennsylvania with her two brothers and her mom. Until one day, scientist predicted an asteroid will hit the moon, and when it did, Miranda’s life shattered. Tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, and a huge snowstorm occured, and instantly many people died. As things get worse, Miranda has to find ways to survive. The theme for Life As We Knew It is to be grateful and never give up because things might get worse, anything is possible, and the results will be

In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the use of different perspectives each chapter allows for this to be highlighted. Throughout the book Darl is the only character that dwells on nature. He uses descriptions like, “the sun, an hour about the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightening (40)” to describe his surrounding. When Cash acknowledges nature he only seems to see what he is able to make from the wood nature provides.

The theme of an occurrence at owl creek bridge is that every person will have different reaction to death and how they handle the fear

It also exemplifies the jurastic difference between the peaceful areas of the forest and the extreme woods in Alaska. One moment there can be a nice little open field and the next you cannot see ten feet without a tree getting in your way. From that the reader can easily foreshadow the events to come in Alex’s

The war in Vietnam presented many challenges to the soldiers both physically and emotionally. In Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, the characters face physical challenges of what they are forced to carry to defeat the enemy. Along with the things they carried, the soldiers were also placed under enormous emotional challenges with death. The characters are forced to deal with their friends and combat partners being shot. This often leads to soldiers feeling like it was their fault for the death of their comrade.

Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way

It is in the woods that they encounter what can only be described as a living horror dragging itself through the greenery, leaving a path of destruction and decay in its wake “When it had gone, Penny and Primrose, kneeling on the moss and dead leaves….then they stood up still silent, and stared together, hand in hand, at the trail of obliteration and destruction, which wound out of the

He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

My essay is primarily written to describe the differences and similarities between the two texts I chose. I chose these texts because they both revolve around the theme ‘Exile and Otherness’. Including the theme, they have many other points in common. And despite the clear similarities, the difference is still there. I think that both texts are able to clearly produce and demonstrate the tragic states of fictional characters associated with exile, otherness, alongside being different and alone.

We are fully in touch with Melissa’s thoughts, and the therefor the narrator can be subjective, which is the case here. Melissa lives in her own fantasy world; this is why she cannot remember small facts from the past . Melissa is convinced that her fantasy world is the real world, and so

First, Jewett proficiently uses local color in creating the setting of the story. She provides a rich portrayal of the natural environment in which the story unfolds. Using numerous phrases, such as "shady wood-road," "great twilight moths struck softly against her," "the air was soft and sweet," and "the stirring in the great boughs," she creates in the minds of her readers a picturesque image of the path Sylvia strolls down, as she leads her cow home (page). Later, Jewett describes the place where Sylvia first saw the white heron as being, "an open place where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew" (page). The settings in local color stories are often quaint and set in natural environments.